MISQUAH — The Lions Club’s first attempt at outdoor bingo ended Tuesday evening in the third game, when a fast-moving thunderstorm crossed the lake from the west and sent roughly thirty players, their cards, their chips, and one airborne dauber in several directions at once.

The idea, Lions president Roger Tho explained the next morning, while drying out the cage of numbered balls on a towel at the fire hall, had been to “freshen up” a reliable but indoor summer staple by moving it onto the park’s new concrete pad. “We thought it through,” Tho said. “People like being outside. People like bingo. We could not, in the planning meeting, identify the flaw. I can identify it now. The flaw is that it can rain three-quarters of an inch in eleven minutes, and on Tuesday, it did.”

No one was hurt. One folding table was lost to the wind and recovered from the edge of the parking lot; several daubers rolled off the pad and were collected the next morning from the surrounding grass, lightly rained on but, Tho confirmed, “structurally fine.” The jackpot, unawarded when play was suspended, rolls over to the next session — “the one part of the evening,” Tho noted, “that went exactly according to plan.”

The club will try again next Tuesday, July 7, in the Legion hall — indoors, dry, climate-controlled, and, several longtime members were heard to observe, where bingo has been held without incident for decades, “probably,” as one put it, “for a reason that we have now, at some expense to the daubers, confirmed.” Found daubers may be claimed at the fire hall. Newcomers are welcome. An umbrella is, going forward, optional.